DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. Hal Needham probably was one of the most famous Hollywood stunt doubles. He did all kinds of stunts in all kinds of movies, but he got his start in Western movies and TV shows such as "Laramie," "Laredo" and "Have Gun - Will Travel." On that show, he was the show's stunt coordinator and the stunt double for its star, Richard Boone. After many years of jumping on horses and stagecoaches, and falling from great heights after being shot, Hal Needham became famous for car stunts. Terry Gross spoke with him in 2011, when he had written a memoir called "Stuntman!: My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life."
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TERRY GROSS: Now, what were some of the standard Western stunts of the '50s and '60s when you were making the Westerns?
HAL NEEDHAM: Well, it had mostly to do with what we call a saddle fall, where you get shot and fall off the horse. We did horse falls, rear-end falls, wagon wrecks, buggies and so on. Also, a thing called a bulldog, where the bad guy's trying to get away, the good guy comes up behind him, jumps from his horse and then knocks the guy off the horse, and it normally winds up in a big fight. And we did high falls and some roping stuff, and - pretty well covers the major of them, anyway.
GROSS: Yeah. Now, one of your early stunts was for "Have Gun - Will Travel," and you were jumping from a rock about 30 foot high onto a stagecoach that was moving by.
NEEDHAM: Oh, yeah. Yes.
GROSS: And you're supposed to land on the top of the stagecoach as it rides by. Tell us what happened.
NEEDHAM: Well, first of all, that was my second stunt on "Have Gun - Will Travel." I had doubled Boone the day before, and he was kind of impressed, and he said, all right - you can do some stuff tomorrow. I got out there and they said, can you jump from that rock to the top of a coach as it's going by, as it's passing. I said, I think so. So anyway, the rock was 30 feet high, and the top of a coach is 6 feet long and 4 feet wide. They said, you want to see a rehearsal? I said, why not? They brought that thing under me, and I thought, I might have let my alligator mouth overload my jaybird back end again.
GROSS: (Laughter).
NEEDHAM: But - 'cause it really looked small. It looked like a postage stamp. Anyway, they brought the coach through, and I hit it right in the center. As matter of fact, I broke through the top, right up to my armpits, and that kind of shocked the folks inside the coach. And when they got us stopped, Boone came over and offered me the job of being his stunt coordinator, as well as his double on "Have Gun - Will Travel."
GROSS: So let me ask you - when you're jumping off a 30-foot-high rock onto a moving stagecoach, the top of which looks like a postage stamp because it's so relatively small from the height that you're at, what kind of mental calculation do you do to figure out when to jump?
NEEDHAM: You know what? You can't say, all right, when the coach gets there, to that mark, I'm going to jump. You just have to look at it because you don't know how fast those horses are going to be running or anything else. It's just a thing that - it's a clock inside of you that you say, now, and you go. There's no way to set a mark or anything like that to leave the rock.
GROSS: Now, on that stunt, was there protection for you? Like, if you missed the coach, was there padding on the ground?
NEEDHAM: Nothing.
GROSS: Nothing.
NEEDHAM: Nothing. It'd be impossible. First of all, they'd have to pad the road in front and behind, and the horses can't go through that, and over the side. They'd have to camouflage it. No. It's just too much of a problem. And if you say you can do it, they expect you to do it.
GROSS: I say this with the greatest of respect. I think you have to be crazy to be a stuntman like you.
NEEDHAM: I won't argue that point.
GROSS: (Laughter) OK. So one of the standard shots that you'd have to do is, like, you're the bad guy, and you're being shot, and you have to fall. So...
NEEDHAM: You mean fall off the horse or fall off of what? A rock?
GROSS: Fall off a balcony, fall off a horse...
NEEDHAM: Sure. Yeah.
GROSS: ...Fall off a rock. You've fallen off all of them. So say, like, you're fall - you're shot. You're falling off from a height.
NEEDHAM: Yeah.
GROSS: So when you started making Westerns, what protection was there for you to fall onto?
NEEDHAM: Well, when I started, and that's a long time ago, they would take sawhorses, you know, like carpenters use. They'd take those, and they'd put 1x12 - pine 1x12s across the top, put some cardboard boxes underneath it and put a mattress or two on top of it. And that's what saved you from being killed, because the boards would bend about 6 inches, and then they'd all break, and then the boxes would catch you. So that's what they had, and believe me, 45, 50 feet off of that into those, about all you could handle.
GROSS: It sounds so makeshift.
NEEDHAM: Oh, it definitely was. But, you know, that's all they could come up with at the time, and I'm going to be really braggadocious here. I'm the one that brought airbags into the stunt world.
GROSS: What's the highest jump you've done?
NEEDHAM: Hundred feet.
BIANCULLI: Former stuntman Hal Needham speaking with Terry Gross in 2011. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
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BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Today, we're talking about Westerns as our week of interviews from the archives celebrating classic films and movie icons continues. Let's get back to Terry's 2011 interview with former stuntman Hal Needham, who got his start on Westerns.
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GROSS: You say one of the most dangerous stunts in Westerns - and if you've seen a Western, you've seen this one - it's the stirrup drag, where a guy falls off his horse, but his leg is still in the stirrup, and the horse keeps galloping, dragging the cowboy across the ground over rocks and brush and who knows what else. Why is that the most dangerous Western stunt?
NEEDHAM: Well, there's a couple of things. Matter of fact, I saw one of our stuntmen get killed doing a stirrup drag.
GROSS: Wow.
NEEDHAM: He had to go through the gate of - entrance to a ranch. And when he fell off the horse, the horse - you rehearse them so they'll go where you want him to go. Well, this horse didn't follow where he's supposed to go. And when he came to the gate, he swung around, the horse did, and it flung the guy way out to the side, and he hit his head on the post - a fence post and killed him. So that reason it's so dangerous, one reason.
The other is when you fall off the horse and hit the ground, you're tied to the horse with a cable to the stirrup. And when you hit the end of that cable, it flings you back under the horse's feet, his back feet. And so you got to put one foot up against the horse's belly to keep yourself from being stepped on by his back feet. It's pretty dangerous.
Now, the way we get released, you have a release on your foot to the cable, and you just put a little wire up to your belt, and you pull that, and that's supposed to release you. If that doesn't work, you have a second release on hooked with a cable, something back - way back by camera, and that releases the whole saddle. And if that doesn't work, you put two or three what you hope are your buddies on the fastest horses you can find, and they're called pickup men. They get out there, and if they see you're in trouble, they're supposed to come in, stop the horse and get you loose. It's really, really dangerous.
GROSS: Were you ever hurt during one of those yourself?
NEEDHAM: Thank God, no, I never was. And I've done quite a few of them, and I just got lucky.
GROSS: So what goes through your mind when a stuntman is killed? Is that - it must be a very sobering experience.
NEEDHAM: We're all aware of the fact that it can happen. And hopefully, when you get ready to do the stunt, you've got it figured out. You got your confidence up. You say, this is going to be OK, and you go for it. And when something goes wrong, we all understand it because we've all had things go wrong. One stunt I did, I broke my back, six rib, punctured lung, knocked out some teeth. That wasn't the way I had it planned at all.
GROSS: Yeah. I'm sure it wasn't. One of your most dangerous stunts was for a Western, "Little Big Man," about Custer's Last Stand.
NEEDHAM: Right.
GROSS: And - so describe the stunt that you had to do here.
NEEDHAM: Dustin Hoffman and his wife are heading west. And they're on - in a stagecoach. They've got a six-up of horses hook to it. They get attacked by the Indians. The shotgun guard gets shot off the coach. The driver turns chicken, and he's up hiding - in the boot of the coach hiding. So the horses run away.
A stuntman doubling Dusty got out of the coach, climbed up on the seat and jumped to the closest horse to the coach. I, as an Indian, came up on the outside and transferred from my horse to the one right next to him. Then he stands up and jumps from that horse to the back of the one ahead of him, and I follow him. Then does it again out to the leader, and I followed him out there. So we did that three times, but we did the whole scene 13 times. And here's what's really hard to believe. We had to do a standing broad jump from the back of one horse to the back of the next one of 14 feet. And I tell you what. There's no athlete, I don't think, can do that standing still.
GROSS: These are horses that are in motion.
NEEDHAM: Oh.
GROSS: They're galloping.
NEEDHAM: They're runaway.
GROSS: Yeah.
NEEDHAM: Runaway - yeah, a coach running away. When we were training the horses to accept us jumping on their back and everything, the way we found we could jump the furthest was to get in motion, get in sync with a horse so when he pushed off his back feet, we would use his momentum to get aside an extra two or three feet so we would get to the next horse. It was the toughest physical stunt I ever did in my life...
GROSS: Now...
NEEDHAM: ...The toughest.
GROSS: I hate to bring this up, but had you failed, you would have been trampled by the horses...
NEEDHAM: Oh, well...
GROSS: ...Or run over by the coach, depending where you were. Yeah.
NEEDHAM: You'd have two, four, or six horses run over you plus a 4,000-pound coach. Yeah. You couldn't fail. If you messed up, you was going to be in big trouble.
GROSS: So you worked with a lot of horses doing Westerns. You owned horses. You trained horses. Two of your most beloved horses were named Hondo and Alamo. And Hondo lost his life as a result of a stunt. He broke his leg doing a stunt.
NEEDHAM: Yep. That's right.
GROSS: What happened?
NEEDHAM: Well, you know, matter of fact, it was on "Little Big Man." I played the Indian that came down and jumped from my horse to the horse pulling the coach. The director wanted a shot of me coming off the hillside prior to that shot, prior to me transferring. So he said, come fast as you can. I said, all right. And it was fall, and the hillside - the grass was all dead and everything. So here I come up field just as fast as Hondo could run. And in a blink of an eye, I was sailing through the air, and he had stepped in a gopher hole and broke his leg. And so he slid a long way. So do I. And I looked back, and I could see he was trying to get up. So I went back to take a survey and see what was wrong and so on, and I realized he had broken his leg.
NEEDHAM: So I held him down. Here's the part that I think is - shows how much I love my horse. We were way out in the country, and I said, does anybody got a gun? When a horse breaks a leg, unless he's a thoroughbred or something, you destroy him. You put him out. So anyway, I said, anybody got a gun? And the prop man said, no, I don't have one. And my buddy said, well, he had one in the car. So I said, go get it. And he came back and handed me that gun. You know, I could not shoot that horse. And the reason I had to shoot him or somebody had to shoot him was they said, if you don't get a vet out here and verify that he had a broken leg before you kill him, you can't collect the insurance. I said, well, hell, it's going to take an hour and a half, two hours to get a vet out here. I don't want that horse to lay there suffering. Get me a gun, you know? So anyway, we wound up shooting him. And don't tell me a big man don't cry 'cause I did.
GROSS: Did it change how attached you allowed yourself to become to your stunt horses?
NEEDHAM: No. You know what? I made so much money with him, and I was such buddies with him. I'll tell you two stories if you'll let me. One was I had one of them, and I was just practicing a little bit. And I fell, and I came up. And I was in my backyard or right close to my backyard, and my wife is out there. And I fell off this horse. And I was sitting, and I sat up on my butt, and I was just sitting on the ground. And he came up, and he put his head over my shoulder. And I scratched his chin, under his chin. My wife said, if you did that to me, we'd get along a hell of a lot better, you know?
GROSS: (Laughter).
NEEDHAM: So that's how - but also, I have a thing in my book about when a horse - if I got two together, I kept those two together all the time so they become buddies. When you take one away, the other one would just pace back and forth in the corral until they worked up a sweat. Or sometimes, if they're ill, a little ill - they've got a stomach ache or something - they'll do the same thing. I've been known to go out in the corral, out in the barn, take some hay and make myself a bed and get a tarp and just cover up and sleep with them, out there in the barn with them. When I do, they calm down immediately, you know? And they'll come over and sniff me, and eventually they'll start eating the hay I'm laying on and things like that. You got to have that rapport with them to understand them.
BIANCULLI: Former stuntman Hal Needham speaking with Terry Gross in 2011. He died in 2013.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILL LEE'S "WE LOVE ROLL CALL Y-ALL")
BIANCULLI: On Monday's show, we conclude our series of Classic Films and Movie Icons with interviews from our archive with Spike Lee and Samuel L. Jackson, who has been in Spike Lee's films "Jungle Fever, "Do The Right Thing," "Mo' Better Blues," "School Daze" and "Chi-Raq." I hope you can join us.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILL LEE'S "WE LOVE ROLL CALL Y-ALL")
BIANCULLI: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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